THE HERMIT DOCTOR OF GAYA (continued 7)

Ayeshi turned, measuring the other man with a grave, scornful deliberation.

"I have learnt to keep my counsel where there is English blood," he said. He did not see the expression which passed like a withering flame over his companion's features. He lifted his hand in salutation, and the curtains fell noiselessly behind him.

Barclay waited, motionless. His breathing was quick and shallow, his whole body tense with pent-up excitement. As the muffled sound of hoofs reached him he turned the light out and the next instant was running towards the compound gates.

A syce leading a horse by the bridle came out of the shadow. Without a word Barclay caught the helmet and long cloak which was held out to him and swung himself lightly into the saddle.

"Which way?"

"Towards Heerut, Sahib."

"See that you remember my orders."

"The Sahib shall be obeyed."

Barclay's steel wrist brought his nervous, fidgeting animal to an instant's complete quiet. He listened intently. He could still hear the sound of hoofs, beating in the distance. He drove his heels into the Arab's flanks and rode out into the stream of pale starlight which flowed down towards the valley.

He rode at a quick canter, dangerous enough on the steep gradation and only justified by his knowledge of every curve in the narrowing roadway. His riding had nothing of the recklessness with which he had driven the night before. He held himself and his horse in the steel grip of a definite purpose.

At the bottom of the hill on which Gaya perched itself like a beautiful white bird he drew rein and again listened. There was no moon; the intense clarity of an Indian night covered the parched and gasping plain with a seeming luminousness in which nothing was visible but unrealities. Overhead the black burnished shield of the sky blazed with its mysterious, unreadable devices. But for the monotonous rhythmic thud dying in the distance the silence was absolute, painful, like the suspended breathing of a fevered body. The river was voiceless.

Barclay rode on. The road had narrowed to little more than a track which the drought and the passing of heavy wagons to and fro to the new bridge had made a trap of crumbling ruts and dust-covered holes. It was five miles to the river, and nearly two hours had passed before the rider caught the first murmur of water. It sounded faint and exhausted. In the vague light the new bridge looked like some monstrous dragon, its body spanning the half-empty river-bed, its thick-set limbs planted stolidly in the sluggish water. It needed no more than a ceremony for it to be complete. Yet Barclay turned up to the old bridge. In view of its approaching demolition it had been neglected and part of the wooden rail had been broken down, making the crossing at nightfall a matter of some danger.

Barclay chose it and rode across with slack rein. On the other side he dismounted and tethered his horse and went on on foot through the trackless jungle grass.

When he stood still he could catch no sound, neither the thud of hoofs nor the faintest movement. The high grass, as it yielded to his body, rustled and cracked deafeningly in his ears. His own breathing sounded like the loud panting of a hunted animal.

The temple lay sullen and dark and silent in the black shadow of the jungle.

Barclay reached the gateway. The obscurity was here so dense that his instinct alone guided him. He went forward deliberately, noisily, sensing the hands that waited for him, the eyes that watched him. Then he struck a light.

The next instant that for which he waited came, and, though he had waited for it, its swiftness and deadliness drove a scream from his lips—a scream that was smothered to a choking groan almost at its birth. He stumbled and fell, his hands twisted behind him, his unprotected face grazing the stones. He felt hot breath on his neck, the cut of a cord round his wrists. Gagged and helpless, he was jerked back to his knees and a dark lantern flashed its eye on to his bleeding face.

Beyond the dazzling circle he could see forms no more than shadows painted dimly against the dense blackness of the temple walls. Nearest to the light, Vahana's wild, expressionless eyes glittered with the cold lustre of a serpent's; but, as he grew accustomed to the light, Barclay recognized other faces, two headmen from neighbouring villages, a handful of priests wearing the Triple Cord on their shoulders, five non-commissioned officers from the native regiment. They crowded round him in a silent circle which contracted like a steel trap. But Barclay seemed neither to fear nor heed them. He threw back his head and looked up into Ayeshi's face. Then he drew himself together as a man does who knows that life and death hover in the balance.

"So you were a spy after all, Mr. Barclay?" Ayeshi said in English.

"No, Rajah, your servant," was the swift answer.

The fine nostrils distended with a deep-drawn breath.

"Do you know who I am, then?"

"I know that you are Ayeshi, the son of Ram Alla, who was deposed and driven into exile by the English. I know that you were saved by a few faithful who feared to breathe the secret even to you. I know that you have borne willingly a stigma which is another's. I know that you have starved and suffered and learned in the gutters of Calcutta that an unworthy English Sahib should go unpunished."

Ayeshi lifted his hand imperatively.

"How have you learnt these things?"

"I have ears in every village, Rajah."

"Why did you follow me?"

"I have a wish to serve you."

"You are English——"

"English!" Barclay laughed. "Yes, I have English blood in my veins. I am the son of the old Tristram Sahib who seduced my mother and brought about her death, who hunted down my brothers and our father's servants and shot them from the cannon's mouth, who gave honourable life to Tristram Sahib, the wealthy and happy and honoured, who gave life to me, an outcaste——"

"Yet a night ago you sat and ate with these, thy people——"

"That also is true. I fought for their friendship, Rajah, I grovelled for it. I schemed for it. I would have sold you and all these, my brothers, if they would have made me one of them. But they would not. They have chosen, not I. Last night, Rasaldû, the swineherd's son, would not sit at table with me. That was the end."

"You have an English wife."

Barclay laughed again.

"Who sold herself to me for a high price, who would rather die ten deaths than be a wife to me, who loves Tristram Sahib——" He broke off and jerked his head towards the intently watching Sadhu. "Vahana here knows something of what I say. Let him testify for me."

The shadowy, unreal circle of faces turned for an instant. Vahana bowed his head in assent.

"I have told you the truth," Barclay went on. "The best and the worst. I have risked life to tell it you. I knew what might await me here—a knife in the dark perhaps without a word spoken—and yet I had to come. Life can be more bitter than death. A man cannot live alone as I have done—there comes a time when his soul cries for his people."

They looked at him silently, without pity. The agony in his hoarse voice did not touch them. For them also he was the Pariah—the outcaste. He read their answer in their eyes and turned back to Ayeshi with a burst of passion.

"Take me—claim me—make me one of you! I have power—I have money—I can do for you what no other man could do. Either you must kill me or make me one of your blood. I know too much. There is no other way out for either of us."

Ayeshi did not move or speak. One of the two priests crept closer, avoiding Barclay's shadow.

"What can you do for us?" he whispered.

"You know very well, O Heera Singh! The drought is on us. The crops will fail. Is there a man in your village who does not owe all that he has to me? What if I make our Lord Ayeshi their deliverer—if he should free them from me? And I have money. Is all that nothing?"

The priest was silent, fingering his sacred cord with eager fingers. But Ayeshi knelt down and looked full into the Eurasian's face.

"You said that you would have betrayed us for their friendship," he said. "What if they came now and offered you their hands——"

"It is not in their power," was the swift and bitter answer. "They have tried—the river is too wide for them."

There was silence again. The yellow light revealed figures lurking behind them, black, vaguely defined forms which glided softly up and down the temple walls. Vahana had bent down and with his claw-like finger drew a pattern in the dust. It was the sign of Swashtika. Barclay drew his breath between his teeth. He laid his hand on the rough-drawn symbol and Vahana's hand closed down on his. The priest wetted his forefinger with his tongue and touched Barclay's forehead, tracing two horizontal lines. But Barclay did not feel him. He was only conscious of that hand, cold, hard, scaly. It seemed to envelop him, to glide up his arm and to reach down and close about his heart.

"One of our blood," the priest muttered, "for evil and for good we claim you one of us."

But Ayeshi made a gesture of proud impatience.

"There can be no evil," he said. "The worst that can come to any of us is death. And what is death but release? We who have seen our faith insulted, our gods denied, our dreams shattered—what is death to us? Each one of us has his own bitter wrong. Let him avenge it under my banner." He turned authoritatively to one of the native officers. "We have had enough of words. From henceforward there shall be nothing said which does not translate itself into action. You, Parga, what have you to tell me?"

The man answered with a military salute.

"All is ready, lord. We are patient. We do but await your signal."

"We have planned for the twenty-fifth of this month, lord," his companion added.

Ayeshi nodded.

"By that time we shall have our forces on this side of the river ready. Give me the map."

The map was spread out on the ground. Ayeshi traced a line down the length of the river, whispering his orders. Here and there one of the soldiers assented or offered a suggestion. The priests were silent but watchful. Their faces glistened like burnished bronze in the yellow light.

But Barclay felt and realized only that hand which had rested on his. It was as though he had plunged his arm into icy water and the chill had begun to creep through his whole body. His blood had become cold and sluggish in his veins.

He listened, and beyond the subdued voices he heard strange sounds—an intermittent rustling amidst the long grass, a hushed, sibilant whispering, the crack of a branch under the weight of a writhing, twisting body.

He lifted his head and it seemed to him that the jungle towered over him, roofing the broken walls of the temple with its sinister shadow.

Vahana watched him unceasingly.

* * * * *

Dawn was still afar off as Barclay rode his horse over the narrow bridge. Once on the farther bank he turned and looked back furtively. Nothing was visible. The forest-clad mountains were no more than a monstrous blot on the burnished shield, wiping out a part of its mysterious quarterings. Yet their massed blackness fascinated him. They filled him with an inexplicable horror which until now he had held partially in abeyance; but in this loneliness it became an obsessing force of panic. Something had happened to him. He sat there in the saddle, but his mind, a second vitally real consciousness, crawled through the trackless undergrowth. His ears heard strange whisperings; things unnamable slid over his limbs and wound themselves about his throat and body, driving the breath from him. He could not taunt himself with feverish imaginings. The man in the saddle might have been a shadow, a figment of the brain, but that second being struggling and gasping for life in those jungle fastnesses was a reality—himself.

It was not imagination, but revelation. A sixth sense had been stabbed to consciousness. Scales had fallen from his eyes.

He forced himself to ride on and in an instant the return became a heedless, panic-stricken flight before an invisible, formless enemy. Even in his own compound there was no safety, no escape from whatever hunted him. Rather in the black silence of the bungalow he recognized a new menace. He tried to master himself,—to call the sleeping syce, but his tongue was dry and thick in his mouth and refused its office. With shaking hands he tethered his horse and crawled stealthily across the verandah to the open windows of his room.

He stood still on the threshold, listening. His own breathing seemed to come from the other end of the room—from some one who crouched amidst the ponderous furniture, watching him. He tried to strike a light, but the match flickered and went out and he dared not try again. He felt that no light could live in that stifling, foetid atmosphere. And the shadows which he had awakened appalled him. He stumbled blindly to the chair beneath the lamp and crouched down into it, hushing his labouring lungs, forcing himself to confront the darkness, the sweat thick and icy on his forehead.

He had dared death that night and had not known fear; but this was different. It was something in himself—an awful disruption, the breaking down of some secret barrier behind which had been imprisoned untold knowledge, a horde of ghostly, inherited memories. He tried to stem them back—vainly.

He—that second self—saw this stain beneath the carpet. He saw old Tristram Sahib seated where he sat—Vahana crawling out of the darkness—the uplifted weapon. He heard a woman's muffled scream—the bumping of a body falling between narrow walls—the sullen splash of water.

These things were to him actual—corporeal.

He turned with a shuddering gasp, burying his face in his arms, hiding from them, awaiting in palsied helplessness for the deliverance of the morning.

CHAPTER VII

THE PRICE PAID

Mrs. Boucicault and her daughter sat on either side of the wide-open windows and avoided each other's eyes. It was the first time that they had been alone together for many months, and they found nothing to say. Had they been total strangers they could have discussed the situation with sympathy, but they were bound together, and to the man on whose return from death to life they waited, by too many ugly memories for any superficial intercourse. They were like galley-slaves, hating each other and the bonds that manacled them to an intolerable intimacy.

There was a faint, sickening taste of ether in the hot air. It seemed to permeate everything, and to Anne, who knew nothing of the surgical side of illness, it conveyed a suggestion of mysterious suffering and horror. It affected her with the same physical and purely instinctive fear which assails most human beings in their first contact with death. It was not so much the thing that was happening as the grim, immaculate ceremonial surrounding it which terrified her. She would have been glad to have been alone, and in her heart she denied her mother the right to be present. But convention and decorum were on Mrs. Boucicault's side and against such opponents Anne felt herself powerless to make a stand. Once she glanced quickly across at her companion and saw how cruelly the daylight treated the small face now that it was without its persistent animation. Neither paint nor powder could conceal the livid pallor beneath the painful slackening of all the facial muscles. Only the mouth retained its straight, unbreakable resolution.

"One can't live as she does without paying for it," Anne thought, and did not acknowledge the little glow of righteous satisfaction which passed over her. Instead she went back mentally to the man lying unconscious at the other side of the bungalow and to her own life.

For all her painful anxiety she felt strangely content. She had the elevated serenity of one who has passed through tribulation to a well-earned happiness. For she had been very unhappy in her life. There were the days of "misunderstanding" with her father, the days in "Trichy" when she had faced the alternatives of a penniless and ill-prepared attack on the unknown world or an ignominious return to a life her whole soul condemned; there were days, even since her marriage, when she realized that the man she had worshipped was not wholly worthy of worship, that in many ways he had fallen below the standard which she set him.

But of late these things had sunk into the background. God had been very good. She had longed so much for a child, and that was to be given to her. That fact alone poured like sunshine over all the past. It seemed to her that with the beginning of that hope everything had combined together to make her happy. Her father was to be made well and strong again. Sigrid Fersen, save where a very few were concerned, had dropped out of Gaya's life into a grey seclusion, and with her the man whom she had sought to drag up the heights of her meretricious popularity. And, best of all, that very morning, when so much hung in the balance, she had regained her love, her humble, possessive adoration of her husband. He had seemed so big, so strong and invincible. The fire in his steady, absorbed eyes had thrilled her, the touch of his hand had given her a passionate, child-like confidence.

"I know that you won't fail," she had whispered. "God bless you, Tris."

"I'm sure He will," he had answered, smiling. And though perhaps there was something in that familiar phrase which jarred on her, still it could not weaken her joy in him or her faith in her own blessing.

"Yes, God had been very good——"

"I think it is over," Mrs. Boucicault said suddenly. "I can hear some one coming——"

Both women rose instinctively to their feet and turned towards the door. Anne's heart throbbed painfully. As Dr. Martin entered she felt a sudden weakness overcome her so that she could hardly stand. The doctor had discarded his white overalls, but he brought in with him a deeper tinge of that nauseating odour. Through a mist she heard him talking, and even in that moment she was conscious of a bitter resentment. He was speaking to her mother.

"Yes—wonderfully successful, Mrs. Boucicault. To tell you the truth I had no idea the I.M.S. concealed such a talent for the knife. Remarkable hand—almost inspired, one might say. Major Tristram can set up in Harley Street any day. Of course we're not out of the wood yet. We can't hope to see much change in your husband for some weeks. Shock and all that, you know. There was a lot more trouble than we suspected. Old trouble which must have caused a good deal of—eh—mental unrest." He rubbed his chin as though on the point of some further information. "Well, I daresay Tristram will go into details. He wants me to stop in Gaya till we know better where we are, and I shall try and arrange to. Very interesting case—very. Hullo, here's Major Tristram himself."

With a little cry of joy Anne turned to run to her husband, but as she saw the man who entered her purpose faltered. She was not given to analysis, and the change in him, because it was not entirely physical, eluded her. And it frightened her. It was as though all her instinctive fears had taken shape in him. He looked exhausted to the point of breakdown, but that she had seen before, and it was not that which had brought her to a standstill. It was something behind the white stillness of his face the passionless detachment, the Nirvana which, had she but known it, comes to men who have passed through a vast spiritual crisis.

"Tris!" she whispered.

She came to him at last and he put his arm round her.

"It's all right," he said simply. His eyes were on Mrs. Boucicault. "Your husband will live," he said. "He may get well."

She nodded, twisting the rings round her thin fingers.

"How long will it take before he is strong again?"

"A few months perhaps."

"Then I—I have that much time left me."

"Mother!" Anne cried out. She felt Tristram's arm slip from her shoulder. He went to Mrs. Boucicault and took her hand in his.

"He may change very much," he said.

She laughed.

"Perhaps—but it will be too late." She made a little grimace. "Well, I have learned the value of time at any rate. Dr. Martin, come and see me into my carriage. My daughter wants to have a good cry."

Dr. Martin offered his arm with a grave courtesy surprising in a man of his somewhat casual temperament, and the two went down the verandah steps talking in an undertone. Anne watched them in bitter silence. The attitude of these two men towards the wizened, painted woman had thrown a shadow of disgust over her happiness. They had treated her as though she occupied the centre of their stage, accepting her flippant cruelty without reproof, offering her an austere reverence. A scornful comment trembled on Anne's lips, but, turning, she saw that Tristram had dropped down in one of the chairs, his face hidden in his hands, and her heart melted towards him. She knelt down and put her arms about his neck.

"Tris!" she whispered. He looked up. "Tris!" she repeated on a note of faint reproach. For she had seen that his face was wet, and tears in a man had always seemed to her rather repulsive. "What's the matter, dear?" she asked.

He smiled faintly.

"I am an ass, aren't I? I don't often do this sort of thing—some things touch me horribly. Besides, I'm a bit rattled still. Those two hours were devilish—you don't know——"

She kissed him solemnly.

"I know how splendid you are—Dr. Martin told us."

"Did he? Well, honestly, I don't believe any other man could have done what I did today. No one else could have wanted to win so badly as I did."

"For my sake, husband?"

"For yours and mine."

"That's sweet of you," she said gently. Her moment's irritation had passed. She rested on his bigness, his redeeming strength and tenderness. "I am very happy, Tristram."

"Are you?" He looked into her face eagerly. "Really happy?"

"Happier than ever in my life. So much that is wonderful has happened. It seems to have made everything worth while. All the suffering." She leant against him, her eyes half-closed in dreamy recollection. "Sometimes I think it's all been for the best. It's taught us charity, hasn't it—to be gentle in our judgment? I know I have often been hard too. Today I could forgive even the man who caused it all."

His arm tightened about her.

"He'd be glad to hear that, Anne——"

"I could forgive." She drew herself up a little. "But I wouldn't help him to escape his punishment, Tristram."

"You couldn't, dear. No one escapes."

"Yes, that's true, isn't it? Sooner or later they are found out. They say criminals always return to the scenes of their crime. Mother told me Ayeshi had been seen slinking about Heerut at night——"

"Ayeshi?" he interrupted perplexedly.

She gave a quick glance into his face.

"Yes—of course, I'd forgotten, no one's ever told you. You see, you were so fond of Ayeshi, and you were ill, and so we arranged that we wouldn't tell you unless—unless he was caught. Afterwards no one liked to, and you're such an old hermit—you never hear anything. But now it doesn't matter, does it? It was Ayeshi who tried to kill my father."

He pushed her away from him as though she had suddenly ceased to exist for him.

"I don't understand——"

She laughed uncertainly—half-angrily.

"Why, Tris, I've just explained——"

"I understood that no one was suspected——"

"I've explained that, too, dear. I thought you would guess when you heard that he had disappeared like that——"

He turned on her almost violently, but even she realized in that moment that he was scarcely conscious of her. His blazing eyes had a sightless look in them that frightened her to her feet.

"I might have known," he stammered, "but I am too big a fool—an idiotic sentimentalist——" He steadied and looked at her straightly with seeing eyes. "Ayeshi must have disappeared to shield me," he said. "It was I who nearly killed your father."

Her face was at first only stupid-looking as though his words had had no meaning—then every trace of colour ebbed from her lips. She wavered, and he sprang to her side, and carried her to the chair which he had just left. An intense, torturing pity swept him. She was so small, so very fragile. He felt himself as something monstrous riding over all her happiness. She clung to him.

"Tris—Tris—please don't say things to frighten me——"

"I've got to. Sooner or later I had to tell you. I didn't mean to be so sudden. But it's true."

She freed herself. There was no strength in her arms, but he had felt her whole body cower and shrink from him and he stood back from her as though she had struck him.

"I can't—I can't believe——" she whispered.

"You must, Anne." He paused, and then went on quietly. "It was after that time at Bjura. I was riding home as best I could with a temperature God knows where—I don't tell you that as an excuse, but as a sort of explanation—and I found your father torturing Wickie. I know now that probably he was as mad and irresponsible as I was, but at the moment I thought he was simply a devil. I intervened—I believe I appealed to him I tried to stop him. He struck me repeatedly, but as long as he didn't touch Wickie I didn't care. Then he ran Wickie through with the sharp end of a bamboo stick—and I struck him. I am very strong—and I had no self-control. It was as though all the brakes had given way—and I struck too hard. That was how it happened, Anne."

He waited. He could not have said for what, but he knew that it was something great in her. He had seen this moment many times before and seen it both as an end and as a beginning of a new life between them. It was in her hands. But at the last a kind of proud confidence had swept over him. It did not occur to him to appeal to her. Understanding is above forgiveness. Either she understood, and there would be no need to forgive, or he was simply a murderer, and then her forgiveness would be valueless.

But he had believed that now she would understand. She crouched in her chair, looking at him with horror in her eyes.

"I can't—it's too terrible—to have done that—and then to have shirked the responsibility——"

Still he waited. He had to explain—that was only fair to her and to himself. But he began to lose hope. He saw himself with her eyes and the eyes of her world.

"You know that I was delirious for a long time afterwards. When I recovered the whole thing seemed finished. No one was suspected as far as I knew. Well, your father meant to smash me. I saw that much in his face. And, frankly, Anne, I did not choose to be ruined for his sake. My life—my work—was of value to others to whom I owed more than I did to him. If I made no effort to escape the consequences of what I had done I also did not immolate myself to a false idea of justice——" He broke off. It was not what he had meant to say to her. It was cold and ugly. But her eyes told him that everything he could tell her, of the deliberately accepted burden of silence, of the motive of a great filial love which had chosen to crush the inborn, conventional instincts of honour rather than tread the easy, chivalrous road of self-accusation, of all that the intervening time had held of doubt, and weariness—would be to her so much hypocrisy and cowardly subterfuge. The crisis struck no fire of sympathy in her which might have illuminated his curt and clumsy sentences. To her he was simply a criminal, and before her he became one—tongue-tied, self-distrustful.

She spoke at last and instinctively he braced himself.

"Are you taking shelter behind your mother, or whom?" she asked sneeringly. Then, as he did not answer, she got up. The stupor which had restrained her hitherto gave way. She shivered from head to foot, and her face was twisted and livid with the violence of her feeling. "And then you married me!" she cried out—"just to shield yourself——"

"Anne!"

"Well, didn't you?"

He strode at her and took her by the shoulders. For a moment she thought, in her horror of him, that he would have struck her, and she threw back her head defying the blow with all the strength of her contempt. But his eyes daunted her. They were neither angry nor guilty—but bewildered.

"Anne, why in God's name did you marry me if you thought of me like that?"

Her lips quivered.

"I didn't think of you like that."

"No, perhaps you didn't. You couldn't have thought of me at all. You just imagined me—you never knew or wanted to know the man I really am. Now that the image is broken, there's nothing left. I am just—somebody you don't know—a total stranger, capable of anything——"

"Isn't it true?" she persisted stubbornly.

"No," he said. "It is not true." He thought a moment and then added with grave simplicity, "It would never have occurred to me. You were just some one I was very fond of. I wanted to take care of you."

She tried to laugh.

"I suppose, having murdered the father, you thought it was your duty to marry the daughter."

His hands dropped wearily to his sides.

"If I hadn't been instrumental in your father's loss, if I had had the faintest hope of his ever being able to take his place in your life again, I wouldn't have asked you to be my wife. I shouldn't have dared draw you into my life. But you were lonely and unhappy—much as I was——"

"You felt guilty and you pitied me," she interrupted with feverish excitement. "I suppose you think you've sacrificed yourself. You never wanted to marry me. It was always that woman—that woman——"

"For pity's sake—don't, Anne!" he pleaded.

"Why shouldn't I? I've the right——"

"You have not the right to say that," he said sternly. "I have behaved like a fool—I have done you, as things turned, a great wrong; but I have never thought of any other woman as my wife."

"Not as your wife, perhaps," she interrupted wildly.

He turned away from her. He felt physically sick and broken. The room, with its suffocating propriety, its prim order, seemed to him an integral part of the scene's sordidness. He had only one instinct left—the thirst for the free air and the loneliness of the life to which he had belonged. She watched him in breathless silence, clasping and unclasping her thin hands. She was the more resentful because he had driven her to an outburst of which she was ashamed.

"When you found my father was going to get better, what did you expect?" she began again. "I wonder since you had gone so far—that you didn't finish your work."

A faint, bitter amusement touched his white lips.

"Yes, Anne, you would wonder that. But I am a doctor—not so much by profession as by instinct. I have to save—to heal where I can. Even then I might have failed in this instance and not found myself guilty. But he was your father—I wanted you to be happy—I think it—it inspired me to do more than I could otherwise have done."

"What did you expect—between us afterwards?" she persisted.

The smile lingered, but without its bitterness.

"Oh, I don't know, Anne—but something different from this. I knew that you'd be pained, even horrified—that was only natural. But I thought you knew me well enough to see the less ugly side. I had a foolish fancy even—that in such a crisis we might find each other—understand each other better. Well—I've been wrong all the way."

She was silent for a moment, gathering together the storm-scattered principles of her life. She was trying to be just, charitable, towards him. The tears glistened on her cheeks.

"I daresay you did mean to make me happy, Tris. But you see, you couldn't. One can't build up happiness on sin."

"I did not feel myself guilty—not in that way," he said gently.

"But you were guilty." Her voice hardened. "It was a crime to have struck a man down for the sake of a mongrel dog——"

He turned quickly. He felt mysteriously outraged, as though she had struck straight and deep into something vital in him.

"It wasn't only a dog, Anne," he said. "It was the pain—all the needless suffering——" He did not try to finish. He could not have explained, because he knew it was not in her power to understand. For the first time he saw all that separated them—not so much a gulf as a world, making her day his night. They were both silent. In a few minutes the superficial wrappings of their life had been torn off and its nakedness held them appalled.

The door opened softly and the new nurse who had come with Dr. Martin looked in for an instant.

"He is coming round, Major Tristram," she said.

"Very well, nurse. I'll be with you at once."

He went towards the door, but Anne forestalled him. Her face was composed and very set, though the tears still hung on her long lashes.

"I don't want you to—I don't think you ought to——"

He looked at her grimly.

"As you wish. Dr. Martin must be outside somewhere. I'll explain. He can take over the case."

"Explain—what do you mean?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"We've got to begin somewhere. Better now."

She stared at him blankly.

"You don't mean—you can't mean—you're not going to tell people?"

"I must. Besides, isn't it what you wish?"

She turned away and sat down, burying her face in her hands. She was crying softly, helplessly, like a child. He came back to her and stood over her as though his first impulse to comfort, her had been checked by recollection.

"Anne, I am a clumsy beggar—I don't understand—I don't know what you want——"

"You can't tell everyone," she sobbed wildly. "You can't, Tris. It would be too cruel. Think of all the people you'd hurt—who would have to suffer with you—all of us, even—even our child—even father. You mustn't do it, Tris. Father may have changed—he will be so happy—I shall beg him for his own sake as well as for mine. He'll do as I ask—I'm sure he will. Tris—it's awful to know this awful thing oneself—but for others to know too—and all the scandal——"

She was incoherent in her piteous despair, but now he understood her.

"You forget Ayeshi, Anne," he said, "and all I owe him."

"Ayeshi——? But people only suspect—he's in hiding because of some money he took—what does he matter? No one could prove anything—only father—and he can clear Ayeshi best of all. Don't you see that—or don't you care? Do you want me to suffer?"

He winced.

"I'll do whatever you want, Anne," he said heavily. "Everything on earth I can do. But I've got to think. I'll tell Martin I've had marching orders, or some lie. He knows the case, and can do everything as well as I could. I'll clear out to Heerut. I've got to see Ayeshi. In the meantime, you'll have breathing space to think things over too—and to decide. You can let me know." He went to the door and there hesitated and looked back at her with pitying wistfulness. "Anne, I don't repent much what I did to your father—I can't—but you didn't deserve to be hurt. And I've hurt you. I can't forgive myself that—ever."

He waited an instant. She did not move and he went out closing the door softly behind him.

CHAPTER VIII

RETURN

"When I heard folks say the place was haunted I just laughed in their faces," Mrs. Smithers asserted moodily. "I don't hold with ghosts and them sort, and in a general way I don't believe in them. But I believe in this ghost all right. We've tried to scrub it out, but it won't go and it's got the grouch on us for trying. It's just sucking the polish out of the furniture. And it's sucking the life out of me; I know that."

She turned to her companion lying curled up in the big basket chair and challenged contradiction with her own appearance. Sigrid looked back at her gravely.

"Your wig's crooked, Smithy dear. Of late its angle has been persistently drunken."

"What's it matter!" Mrs. Smithers returned. "Who cares? We might as well be drunk for all the notice these stuck-up nobodies take of us. What's the use of being respectable, if there's no one to see? Might as well fade away, comfy, that's my opinion." Whereupon, suiting her action to her words, she snatched the offending erection from her head, sat on it, and proceeded to rumple up the short grey hair till the last vestige of propriety was lost in a ludicrously rakish disorder. "Well, I've been respectable for your sake for two solid years, Sigrid, and it's nigh done for me. Now I'm myself again, and I mean to stick to meself or bust; so there."

Sigrid gave a laugh that ended with a sigh.

"Your nice, wicked, unprincipled self, Smithy! It reminds me of old times."

"H'm, does it? Well, nothing reminds me of old times in this horrible place. Nothing—not even you. You're just the outsides of what you were, Sigrid—a sort of husk. I don't know where you are—but the real you isn't here at all—and a good job too." She paused and then wistfully, rather shyly: "You don't even play nowadays, my dear."

Sigrid got up slowly.

"Smithy, one couldn't play in this room. I could play in a garret or in the streets, but not here. Fancy Beethoven and that marble atrocity! Even Elgar! No, no, I couldn't." She went out past Mrs. Smithers on to the verandah and there lingered for a moment. "Look at the sunshine!" she said dreamily. "That, at least, is always the same for the just and the unjust, the happy and the unhappy. Doesn't that console you?"

Mrs. Smithers shook her head.

"It isn't the same. It's an awful thing here. They say if it goes on beating down like that it will mean thousands and thousands of deaths. It's cruel. But, such as it is, it don't come inside this place, Sigrid. It beats down on the road out there, but it don't touch us. We're walled in—the Lord knows by what—but we're walled in."

Sigrid took her lace parasol and went down the steps to the wide avenue which swept round in a semicircle to the road. She still moved with her smooth, tigerish elasticity, but she herself was conscious of an overwhelming fatigue. It was as Smithy said—the spirit of the place had triumphed. Little by little it had overpowered the garish, incongruous splendours with which Barclay had sought to change its character. The life and gaiety which he had schemed for had never crossed the threshold, and now he no longer fought, but in sullen acquiescence watched gloom and decay rise like a sombre tide over its old ground. The place was moribund. The people in it moved softly and spoke instinctively in hushed voices as though somewhere in those empty rooms some one lay dead.

Sigrid reached the compound gates. It was still early in the morning, but the heat burnt down on the white road with the reflected fierceness of a near and monstrous fire. The air was thick and tasted metallic. A bullock-wagon toiled up towards Gaya, came to an exhausted halt, and then, in response to listless imprecations, creaked heavily on its way. The mingled sweat and dust lay in ridges on the animals' heaving flanks and scored the dark faces which were turned for a moment in Sigrid's direction. Man and brute were curiously allied in that blank and yet piteous stare. It was as though both visaged suffering and visaged it dumbly, patiently, accepting it as the decree of life.

Then all was still again.

A man on horseback turned the bend of the road and came at a lumbering walk down-hill towards the bungalow. She stood and watched him and an odd, unsteady smile of recognition played with the corners of her lips. No other man in Gaya rode such a lank, spindle-legged mare, no other man cut so quaint a figure, no other man could have worn those clothes and borne himself so bravely. For, despite that touch of the grotesque, there was something splendid and royal about him, something in his bigness, in the grand lines of his body, in his freedom and unconsciousness that made him physically kin to those giants whose fearless, joyous living glimmers through history and legend—to the Siegfrieds and the Beowulfs and the Parsifals, men of the forest and the mountain, who drank deep of life at its source and died on heights which our day has forgotten.

He carried a yellow-haired dog under one arm and an ordinary covered wicker basket was tied to his saddle, and despite his efforts jolted somewhat to the plaintive protests of a cat's mewing.

She would have turned and avoided him, but the bigness of him had held her riveted too long. He drew rein and swung himself to the ground beside her.

"I've brought you Richard," he said simply. He did not offer her his hand or greet her, although they had not spoken to each other for many weeks. He seemed to sweep all ceremony aside.

"I ought to have brought him before—I promised, didn't I?—but somehow I couldn't. It was like a slight to Wickie. He's had a rotten time though, poor chap. You'll make it up to him, I know."

She patted the mongrel's distrustful snout. The man's proximity shook her composure so that she seized eagerly on the first thought that came to her.

"What other passengers have you on board?" she said, with a little nod towards the heaving and mysteriously creaking basket at his saddle.

"My tabbies," he said solemnly. "They've got rather obstreperous since we've been civilized. My wife doesn't like them running about after me, so they had to be shut up, poor beggars, and there's nothing like shutting people up for bringing the devil out of them. Now I'm taking them with me to Heerut." He smiled a little. "I'm going back to the wilderness," he said.

He took off his helmet and ran his hand through the thick, tawny hair with a gesture like that of a sleeper freeing himself from the clouds of an evil dream. The light striking through the branches of the mohwa-tree lit up his face, and, looking up at him and reading all that the last months had wrought, she felt a pang of angry pity. If this was Siegfried, then it was not the Siegfried of Brünnhilde's fiery mountain, but the man of the Rhine Valley, Gudruna's man, fettered by civilization and weakened by its trickery and dishonesty. Had he also drunk of the cup of forgetfulness, she wondered? Had he lost his vision of the fire-girded rocks above where he had won his manhood? A flicker of the old mockery shone in her eyes.

"You don't look very well, Major Tristram," she said.

He shook his head.

"Oh, I'm well enough—physically at any rate." He laid his hand on his heart with a rueful laugh. "I've got a sort of spiritual indigestion though—it's this life—it doesn't suit me or my tabbies. It's too neat and tidy. I'm like that what's-his-name person who had to put his hand to his mother earth to keep strong. I need to be doing and fighting, struggling for existence in my mother wilderness to keep decent. Well, I shall have enough of that out there. Unless the drought breaks soon we're going to have more trouble. The unhappy folk in the village are beginning to die off like flies, and when the famine comes——?" He shrugged his shoulders.

"You don't look fit for such work," she exclaimed bitterly.

"I'm tired—that's all. I had a stiff day of it yesterday." He looked at her with a flash of boyish enthusiasm. "Hasn't any one told you?"

"No one has told me anything," she said. "People don't rush here with their latest gossip."

He flushed painfully.

"Oh, well, it isn't exactly gossip. It's about Boucicault."

"Boucicault?"

"Yes. You know Sir Gilbert Foster gave him up. Well, I found something Sir Gilbert didn't—a little spot on the brain not bigger than a pin's head. I operated yesterday, and I believe he'll get well. Isn't that a feather in my cap?"

He looked up, smiling into the sunlight, and waited for her to speak, until the silence became oppressive. Then he turned to her, drawn by an instinct which the next instant he knew was justified. He caught her by the arm, shaken from all his resolute self-possession by what her face revealed to him.

"Sigrid—what is it—you're ill—in pain——"

But she freed herself almost violently, steadying herself, forcing the blood back into her cheeks by a sheer effort of the will.

"It's nothing—don't fuss over me. It's the heat—nothing more——"

"Then you ought not to be out here."

She laughed defiantly.

"You're not my doctor, Major Tristram, and I won't be bullied. Besides, you've whetted my curiosity. There now, I'm all right again. What were you saying about Colonel Boucicault? You—you operated, and now he's going to get well?"

"I think so." But he answered absently. He was still intent on her face, striving to get beneath the mask. The moment's livid pallor had gone, but she was none the less changed. Her voice, level and quiet, had yet a new tone in it—a kind of hoarseness which he knew as a symptom of exhaustion and pain. She turned away, trying to avoid his eyes.

"Has he been able to speak?"

"Not yet. He is not even properly conscious. It may last some weeks."

She gave a little cynical laugh.

"I suppose some one will be glad."

"Anne—my wife."

"Ah, yes—your wife." Some new thought struck her. She turned back to him, with a line of perplexity between her arched brows. "Aren't you leaving him very soon?"

He hesitated, and then answered slowly:

"Dr. Martin is with him. I have to go to Heerut. It's not only my work. I've heard that Ayeshi's somewhere in these parts, and I've got to find him."

"What do you want with Ayeshi?" she asked, no less deliberately.

"I've got to bring him back. I only heard yesterday of the suspicion which sent him into hiding, and, I am afraid, to the devil. The suspicion is unwarranted. He's got to come back and be cleared."

"Poor Ayeshi!" she said under her breath.

He nodded, his eyes darkened with pain.

"He has suffered horribly and unjustly."

"Needlessly!" she corrected vehemently. "Uselessly! Who minds sacrifice or suffering or injustice so long as the end—the purpose—is clear and attained? It's the pitiable uselessness——" She broke off, tapping the ground with an exasperated foot. But he had heard the tears in her voice.

"Isn't that the horror of all suffering?" he asked, wearily—"its apparent uselessness? We can only hope it leads somewhere."

"Oh, for pity's sake don't be platitudinous!" she burst out. "It's almost as though I was listening to Anne talking."

"My wife!" he reminded her sharply.

"Oh, you are very loyal!" she retorted.

He was silent a moment, and then laughed, covering over his own pallor.

"It's only a sense of justice. A wife isn't responsible for the poor qualities of her husband's brains, is she?"

"She may be responsible for his becoming a sleek prig," she said cruelly, then, with a quick, almost girlish gesture of appeal: "Don't be angry, Major Tristram! The heat has disagreed with me mentally and physically. Let's talk of something else. Tell me something about your mother."

He looked at her, puzzled, and naïvely pleased.

"What shall I tell you about her?" he asked.

"Oh, I don't know—tell me if she is well and happy."

He bent down to stroke the dog at his feet, hiding his face.

"I believe she is. In her last letter she hoped to live to welcome us both home——"

"Will that hope be gratified, Major Tristram?"

"I fear not," he answered unsteadily.

She was silent, looking wistfully ahead into the white sunlight.

"Ever since that day I saw her picture and heard her story I have been interested in your mother," she said at last. "She is the sort of woman whom one wants to be happy—whose happiness one would like to shelter to the end."

"One can't protect another's happiness," he said. "I've learned that much."

"I also," she said gravely.

He straightened up. His blue eyes rested on her face with a treacherous, smouldering trouble.

"I can't help feeling that you're—you're suffering," he said. "It's the only thing I'm quick at guessing at—if it's only physical—please go in and—and rest——"

She shook her head. There was a tenderness in her faint smile which a woman may feel for some big, clumsy, loving boy.

"I'm not tired. I come down here every day and watch life go past."

"Sigrid——" He faltered. "Does that mean that you are very lonely?"

"No—not very. My husband is always away now. Mrs. Boucicault and Mary come sometimes—and even Mrs. Bosanquet. I think they all love me, but they can't alter circumstances, and it makes them desperately unhappy. Often I wish they wouldn't come——" She waited a moment, studying his set features with a pitying knowledge. "I know what you're thinking, Major Tristram. You're comparing this life with the golden palaces and the mountain-tops, with my splendid living and splendid dying."

She burst out laughing and patted him on the arm. "Oh, my innocent friend, don't you know us mortals better than that—don't you know how we love to air our borrowed souls and talk largely and pompously about the ideals we've cribbed out of a novel? There is nothing in it—nothing. I just sold myself for an easy life in a mud hut in the valley. Let that comfort you."

He threw back his head, looking her full in the face.

"That's a lie," he said. "You must have loved greatly."

For a full minute they remained staring at each other in defiant silence. And under his unhappy eyes her expression changed and grew careless and indifferent.

"Well—perhaps you're right, perhaps I did love with all my heart." She held out her hand. "But I am very, very tired now. The heat is appalling. I wish you God speed, Major Tristram."

He scarcely touched her. He swung himself up into the saddle with a suddenness which startled Arabella into a youthful curvet. The tabbies mewed protest, and Tristram laid his hand soothingly on their basket. Then he looked down and saw Sigrid standing at his knee. The change in her held him motionless for all that every nerve in him ached for motion and action. Her small, pale face lifted itself to his in breathless eagerness; her parted lips quivered, the eyes were fiery with the glitter of sternly mastered tears.

"Tristram—tell me—are all the old dreams gone?" she asked huskily.

His mouth under the short ruddy moustache hardened.

"I am going back to find them."

"That's well—go back, Tristram. They may be all that are left any of us at the end. Our dreams are real—reality is nothing. See—!" She laid her hand on her breast with a curious gesture of self-accusation. "I am all your wife would call me—just a mean, soulless fortune-hunter. You've found me out. There is not one fine or noble or high thing in me—and yet your vision of the woman who danced that night, who has played to you the finest music in the world is no illusion, but the truth. Keep it—remember it. Perhaps"—she smiled faintly—"your memory of her may bring Undine to her soul."

He looked away from her.

"I can't help myself——" he said roughly.

"Don't try. Let us keep all the beauty that we can."

She laid her hand on Arabella's long neck and stroked it caressingly. And now something elfish and illusive dawned under her expression of intense earnestness. "Do you remember—you used to go down to the temple when the moon rose and dream you saw me dance among the ruins——"

"I was a romantic boy—half crazed with loneliness——" he broke in with repressed vehemence.

"The moon rises tonight," she said, so gently that he scarcely heard her. Yet something insistent, patient in her forced him to meet her eyes. He saw that they were dry and brilliant, tragically exultant. They betrayed her careless smile, the affectation of demure mockery with which she once more gave him her hand. "Major Tristram, I have a foolish presentiment that we shall meet just once again—and after that no more. Good-bye till then."

He did not answer. She turned lightly away from him. And he rode on down towards the valley.

CHAPTER IX

FOR THE LAST TIME

Memory has many merciless weapons, but none keener, crueller than a room which has belonged to our dead. Who amongst us has escaped that moment of return after what seems the culmination of all agonies when the mere position of a chair, a glove thrown down idly and forgotten, a little touch of familiar disorder tears open the freshly closed grave and shows us on our way to a new, seemingly endless road of pain?

Something of that impotent grief laid hands on Tristram as he stood on the threshold of his old home. The barely furnished room was as he had left it that night of Meredith's visit. An instinct had forbidden his return. Shortly afterwards he had gone to Trichinopoly to be married, and since then the place had stood deserted.

The camp-bed had been tidied by Meredith's conscientious hand, and the few breakfast things washed and replaced, but there was cigarette ash on the table and the lamp stood where it had burnt between them. It had a grey, dead look, as though it had burnt itself out. The chair where he had sat in that final hour of reckoning expressed vividly the movement with which he had risen. There were small, regular fragments of torn cardboard beneath the table, and the dust lay thick and white over them like a shroud. The dust was everywhere. It veiled the photograph of his mother so that he could not see her face.

And the dead man whose personality the place expressed so poignantly was himself. He felt towards it as a spirit may do, looking down on the body which it has quitted for ever. Not years, but a deep, narrow gulf of experience separated him from the grown boy who had lived out his joyous, romantic creed between these wooden walls, who had striven and dreamed in their cool solitude, and gone thence day after day to fight the bitterest of all realities, human suffering, himself living in a world of his own imagining.

Looking back, he saw that those had been winged days of inspiration. He saw that in his dreams he had stood close to the inner life of men which is greater than reality and had seen visions and been dimly, gloriously aware of great truths. These things had gone from him. He stood with his feet planted on firm earth and knew nothing but the dust and the turmoil and the darkness.

But because there was stern stuff in him, he went about his work patiently. With the help of the servant who accompanied him, he dusted and tidied like a woman, unpacked his medicine-chest and set out his instruments in their glass cases. The two tabbies which he had set at liberty prowled disconsolately about their old home, seeming to miss something. He called to them and fed them, but they did not respond, and presently they slipped out into the street and vanished. He let them go. He felt that they would not return. They had forgotten him and had grown wild in their captivity.

The brief dusk which precedes the Indian night shrouded the village street, when at last, his work done, he came out and closed the door of the hut behind him. The street was empty. That fact did not as yet appear strange to him, for the murderous heat of the day, far from relaxing, seemed to have become intensified and hung thick and sullen in the tainted air. Overhead the sky threw off its brazen robes and came out in a luminous purple, whose darker brilliancy was no less sinister. As yet there was no sign of the break for which the land waited in gasping agony.

Tristram went on his way towards the cross-roads. He passed a little group of old men returning from the river and would have spoken to them, but they salaamed and there was something in that ceremonious greeting, in their stony, expressionless faces which chilled the blood and forced him to go on wordless.

It was dark by the time he reached the council-tree. As he approached he had heard a murmur of voices, which were hushed as his shadow loomed up over the circle of squatting figures. In the brightening starlight, he recognized Lalloo in the place of honour at the foot of the battered idol. Other forms he recognized, and for the first time he became aware that he had seen only old men since his return.

The circle greeted him gravely. He sat down at Lalloo's side and filled his pipe. He talked of the drought and of the coming famine and asked after those he knew. The glowing bowl of his pipe threw a dull reflection on his face, and he felt that their eyes were fixed on him. They answered his questions with a measured slowness as though each word had to be chosen and weighed, and when his questions ceased they too became silent. One after another a shadow rose from the circle and glided out into the darkness.

Presently only Lalloo remained.

Tristram got up.

"Tell me," he said, "what is happening here?"

Lalloo lifted himself slowly and stood deferentially bowed, his hand caressing his beard.

"Nothing, Sahib."

Tristram smoked placidly.

"That is a lie, Lalloo. Once you were my friend."

"It is long since the Dakktar Sahib lived amongst us."

"Is friendship forgotten from one day to another?"

"There is a saying, Sahib, that it must be won every day afresh."

Tristram was silent for a moment, hiding from the other's eyes how sure and deadly the thrust had been. Then he shrugged his shoulders.

"I'm afraid fate means to give me another chance to serve you and win your friendship, Lalloo."

"The wheel turns but once in a life-time," was the enigmatic answer.

"That may be. Well, I don't intend to cadge for your good-will. I shall stay here and see you through whatever is coming. In the meantime, tell me where can I find Ayeshi?"

Lalloo gave no sign.

"Ayeshi comes no more——" he said.

"Doesn't he?" Tristram laughed grimly. "Well, the next time he doesn't come, will you tell him that I must see him. Perhaps his friendship will have worn better. Tell him that he may return to us in safety and honour."

"There is no return for Ayeshi, Sahib."

"Dead——?"

Lalloo glanced up through the darkness into the Englishman's face. For a minute his own manner changed, losing something of its impassive reticence.

"Sahib, there are things which no man may forget and prosper. For the sake of one memory—leave here, leave Gaya—there is an illness coming which even the cunning hand of the Dakktar Sahib cannot stay——"

"Is that a threat, Lalloo? Do you know me so little that you think I should turn tail——"

The old money-lender lifted his hand almost with authority.

"No man can change the course of his fate, Sahib. But I have paid my debt."

He salaamed and slipped away into the irregular silhouette which the tumble-down huts threw into the palely-lit street.

Tristram lingered a moment. His pipe had gone out, and he lit it again with an affectionate care, which covered tension. An instinct, more delicate than a seismograph, inherited from men who had learnt at bitter cost the significance of a glance, had warned him. It fed itself on the unbroken silence, on the fevered, palpitating heat. The bo-tree, whose leaves quivered to the faintest breath, was still as though it, too, was aware of an approaching change and listened for its footfall. The very light which filtered down from the stars and poured in a pale stream between the black banks of the street carried with it a suggestion of a near and brooding menace.

Tristram walked slowly up towards the northern entrance of the village. In the past he would not have walked alone. There would have been Ayeshi on one side of him and some woe-begone villager on the other, with Wickie scampering in and out among the shadows, pursuing, with the uncrushable optimism of his kind, the elusive mouse. And Tristram, listening in memory to those past sounds and voices, was overwhelmed, not with a sense of an invisible danger, but with a bitter loneliness. He had now only one desire, and that to get away from these silent, watching walls, out into the open.

He walked fast, but by the time he had reached the narrow road along the river the first bar of moonlight had struck across the valley. He stood still again, for beneath the sullen muttering of the water he had heard other sounds.

Two horsemen rode out of the shadow. He made way for them, and as they came abreast the man nearest to him turned his head, so that the light fell full on to his face.

Tristram sprang to the horse's head, forcing the startled animal to its haunches. The rider made no sound, but his companion turned about instantly and bore down upon Tristram as though to force him back into the river. In that swift course of action not a word had been spoken on either side. The Englishman held his ground. With an iron skill, he dragged the plunging horse about so that it came between him and his aggressor, who reined in frantically on the very verge of the steep and muddy bank.

"Ayeshi!" Tristram exclaimed, imperatively.

The Hindu peered down into his face. The recognition for which Tristram waited with passionate hope did not come. Ayeshi drew himself up in the saddle.

"Let me pass, Major Tristram."

Tristram laughed between his teeth. The hope was dead in him. "No, by the Lord, I won't. You've got to listen to me first. I don't know what devil's game you're playing, but I know what you've done—what you've sacrificed for me—you've got to listen—I've a right to ask this of you——"

The second rider burst out laughing. Tristram could not see his face, but the laugh had a familiar ring. A pale satiric smile quivered at Ayeshi's mouth.

"I have ceased to be your servant, Major Tristram!"

"Have you ceased to be my friend as well?"

He waited. He heard a whispered appeal. Ayeshi's companion shifted his position and Tristram, though he could see nothing, knew that he was now covered by a revolver. He knew, too, that it was no threat but an intention. Death tugged at the leash. He drew himself up to meet it. Had he possessed a weapon, he would not have sought to defend himself. An overwhelming indifference akin to relief rested on him. He released Ayeshi's bridle and stood back a step. He was like a drowning man, fighting off the final and fatal apathy. "Is there no memory, Ayeshi, which gives me the right to appeal to you?" he asked.

The smile faded from the Hindu's haggard features. He threw back the loose white sleeve from his arm and pointed to the wrist.

"There is one memory, Major Tristram, against a hundred wrongs with which your race has afflicted me and mine. That memory has saved you. A life for a life——"

He made a gesture of proud authority. The next instant, both men were riding at a fast canter into the darkness.

Tristram listened absently to the water as it poured over the rhythmic thud of hoofs, till there was no sound left but its own languid murmur. The indifference with which he had faced the end receded from him like a narcotic before the returning tide of pain. He saw now that in that moment death had seemed not so much a release as a blotting out of failure, a passing on to the hope of a new and greater achievement. For he had failed. Upon the recognition Ayeshi had set the seal. He had ploughed and sown and watered the acre of earth which had been given to him in stewardship, and there was no harvest. He had poured out his strength and faith over that beloved ground, and it lay before him in hard unfruitfulness. The magnitude of his bankruptcy staggered and stupefied him.

It would have been better for others had Ayeshi forgotten his debt—better for Anne, entangled innocently in the mesh of his blunders, for his mother who would have seen in that death only a mysterious, tragic repetition. Both would have been spared the pitiable anti-climax of his career, one at least the publicity of an incomprehensible dishonour. He stood at the edge of the water, listening to its luring whisper as it slid past in the blackness beneath him, thinking of those two women. For in them he had worked out his creed of happiness, in them he had failed most utterly. One other woman indeed crossed his thought, but she stood apart, neither failure nor success, but a golden figure of enigma, a fancy, a dream that had become a reality, and had separated itself from him and gone into the turmoil and mystery of life, a separate individuality lost to him forever.

The moon rose slowly and majestically above Gaya's mountain. It poured its pale splendour over the plain and changed the black-flowing river into a polished, glittering road of silver. The man wrestling with his last problem stood in the midst of the light, his shadow thrown in gigantic outline against the high-standing grasses. And little by little the light permeated his greater darkness and reached his knowledge. He lifted his eyes from the black temptation and despair of the waters to the faintly shadowed disk rising in serene immortality amidst the music of her million worshippers. And suddenly the tension and horror passed from him. He lifted his arms above his head with a gesture of release and greeting. His stifled lungs drew in the life which came down to him from those vast heights of infinity.

This much remained; for the foolish and the wise, for the successful and the failures, for Lazarus starving in the gutter and the rich man starving at his loaded table—the earth's godliness, man's oneness with her and with his brother, as yet but dimly felt and broken by devastating storms of passion, yet moving on triumphantly to the divine, far-off event of perfect unity. Thus in his isolation he was not alone, but could reach out in fellowship to the whole earth. It did not matter that he had failed. Others would follow stronger and wiser than himself. They would till his barren acre—perhaps out of his very dust would spring the harvest which had been denied him.

The moment's ecstasy passed, but behind it followed a deep and healing serenity. He walked on slowly. "Our dreams are real—reality is nothing," Sigrid had said, and now the words were illuminated with his own knowledge. They gave her back to him. They lifted her figure out of the sordid ugliness of the events which had blurred and marred his vision of her. He had known her best when he had known her least, and as he knew her so she would belong to him and go down with him through all the years.

He reached the temple gateway. He did not know nor care what power had drawn him there. He stood in the entrance looking into the moon-flooded court, remembering those far-off nights when he had come there to picture her as he had seen her amidst the trumperies of a stage churchyard, transfiguring them with the energizing spirit of her genius. His imagination had painted her amidst the grandeur of these broken pillars. In his romantic fancy it had not seemed incongruous that she should dance against the background of an alien thought and art. Fearlessly he had linked beauty with beauty, perfection with perfection.

And as he stood there gazing down the softly radiant avenue of columns towards the black entrance to the antarila he saw her. He knew one moment's agony of doubt, of fear, of mental disintegration as though the marvel of it had torn down the walls of his mind and spirit, thrusting him out into a bottomless void. Then, as a falling bird spreads out its wings and swings back in safety to its old heights, his mind rose out of the moment's chaos and went to her in passionate recognition. It did not matter then whether she was fancy or reality, whether he was sane or mad. The splendour and wonder of it was all.

At first she was a shadow among shadows. She seemed to hover on the verge of the light as a thought hovers on the verge of form. Then, without effort, seemingly without movement, so still and quiet did she hold her whole body, she glided out of the darkness, and, with her arms raised above her head, her face lifted to the flood of moonlight, she stood still, sur la pointe, poised in attitude of joyful waiting.

She wore the low bodice and short, full skirts of the old classic ballet. A slender wreath of laurel crowned the smooth, fair head. Though as yet she stood afar off from him, he knew that her eyes laughed, that her mouth was open in that wide, frank smile of happiness, that she was breathing deep with the foretaste of ecstasy. He knew, too, for what she waited—for the bar of music which should set her free.

It came at last. He heard it rush down through the stillness. It caught her up on its crest and swept her down the path of silver towards him. He knew it and recognized it. Its delirious beauty poured through his blood. And even if his instinct had not seized it she would have taught him. Her movements, her hands, her feet her body sang it to him.

She danced. Even in these moments when all clear thought was suspended he knew that this was something that his generation had never seen. It was the final word of a great art, often debased, now lifted to the heights where the soul pours through the body to triumphant expression.

She danced. Her shadow rose and fell upon the grey, time-defaced columns not more silently. There was no technical feat that she did not strike like a note of music in her passage, but the marvel of it was lost. As the daring flight of a gull, swooping from precipice to precipice, becomes a simple thing of ease and beauty, so her laughing, dangerous steps over the uneven flags seemed no more than an instinctive, effortless volition. As the brook leaps and sparkles over its rocky bed, now in sunlight, now in shadow, now rushing forward in headlong eagerness, now caught in a clear pool and held an instant in quivering suspense, so joyously and fearlessly she passed from the quick, brilliant passage of the waltz to its slower, deeper movement.

She danced. And it was a religion. Amongst the shades of departed worshippers she was the living spirit. She called them back from their dust-strewn oblivion to the rites of their mystic faith. She leapt the barriers of time and race. The ruined Hindu temple, its towering sikhara rising up over its holy mystery to the stars, identified itself with her; she became its priestess, it became her natural background, the splendid shrine of her genius.

She danced. As David danced before the Lord, so she offered up the incense of her art to whatever was divine in that crumbling monument to man's faith in God. Greater than prayer or praise was the joy of her body and the laughter of her face lifted to the moonlight.

She danced. She had the austerity of nature. Her appeal to the senses was the appeal of a flower, of a butterfly's wing, of a lark singing amidst the azure, of the forest and the mountain and the running water. It was the appeal by which the earth calls men back to their sonship and the knowledge of her divinity.

She danced. And to the man who watched her she was all things that he had ever loved, ever believed in, ever hoped for.

A cloud passed over the moon and threw the temple into obscurity. She was for the moment only the shadow of herself. It seemed to him that the music had broken off and that she too had faltered. Then, as the light came out from behind the drifting darkness, he saw her glide down the avenue of columns, on tip-toe, her arms raised, her small fair head thrown back as though she drank in the growing radiance.

But her expression had changed. Her face had a look of child-like awe, of breathless, startled wonder.

She danced. It was the apotheosis.

She came like a leaf blown before the wind and like a leaf sank slowly to the ground. She was so small, so frail and white, she seemed no more than a flower lying on the great stone flags beneath the pillars.

He ran out to her. He knelt beside her and gathered her up with her head against his knee, calling her by name. But it was only the half-dazed dreamer who called her, for one glance at that white still face, with the faintly shadowed lips, told him that she could not answer. He lifted her in his arms. For all the sick horror that drove its claws into him he was still too much the man of action to hesitate. She was so light. It seemed to him that he carried a tired, sleeping child—something so frail and tender that his own strength seemed giant-like and almost brutal. He scarcely felt the burden of her, and yet before he reached the outskirts of the village he knew himself broken by her nearness. Her warmth enveloped him. He could feel the faint, irregular breath against his cheek. A perfume more subtle than a flower's reached his senses and stirred them to an exaltation that was beyond reason, far beyond desire. Her face rested against his shoulder and he could have bent and touched her cheek with his lips. He did not. He carried a Holy Thing—a vessel into which the Creator had poured all beauty—a lamp whose flame of genius flickered beneath the breath of death, a woman whom he loved with all the force and passion of his manhood. Beneath great banks of sullen cloud rolling up over the moon's silvered field, the village slept or seemed to sleep. He strode through its forbidding silence like a man possessed. He had become invulnerable, omnipotent. There was no force on earth that he could not have met and scorned in that hour save the invisible spectre stalking at his elbow.

He reached his hut at last and laid her on the camp-bed. He lit the lamp and with ruthless, skilful fingers ripped open the close-fitting bodice about her breast. He forced a stimulant between the blue lips. In everything he was as swift and sure as though no fear knocked at his heart, as though his own pulses beat with the smoothness of old custom.

It was done at last—all that he could do. She lay there in her deep unconsciousness like a fair princess from a child's dream. The laurel wreath had freed itself from the pale gold of her hair and fallen back upon her pillow, making a dark frame for her ethereal pallor. He took it gently and laid it on the table. Up to that moment he had held himself in an iron calm, but the touch of that simple ornament, with its poignant significance, struck deeper than all his memories. He turned to her and knelt down beside her, pressing the still hand to his lips in an agony of helpless pity.

The seconds passed. Each one, for the man kneeling there, was measured by the sound of the quick-drawn, shallow breath. Each one, as it passed, left behind a deepening hope. His fingers rested on her pulse, and as though his will drew her back from the depths into which she had been sinking, he felt it slowly steady and strengthen.

And suddenly he looked up, knowing that her eyes were open.

They were very clear—very peaceful. They looked down into his haggard face with a wondering tenderness. Her lips moved. Twice she essayed to speak. He drew closer to her.

"Wasn't it the end——?" she whispered. He shook his head. He could not have answered her. "Isn't it the end, Tristram? I'm—I'm dying, am I not? Tell me—I'm not afraid—not very—tell me——"

"No—please God——"

She smiled with a ghostly touch of her old mockery.

"You—you believe in God, Tristram. Do you care so much?"

"Yes—I care."

She lifted her little hand as though it was almost too heavy a burden for her weakness, and laid it on his bowed head.

"It doesn't matter what we say to each other now—we don't need to pretend. I'd hoped there would be no coming back, but now I'm glad. I love you, Tristram."

"I love you," he answered.

And therewith there came silence and peace into his tumult. The warring events of their lives poured into a deep and tranquil river flowing on irresistibly seawards. They knew now with the great certainty which comes in such moments that there was no end, no power in heaven or earth to blot out that simple confession and all that it must mean, now and in whatever hereafter awaited them. He could look into her face over which death had passed its hand, without fear, almost without pain. She too had ceased to suffer. Her hand caressed him softly.

"I knew you would come, Tristram."

"I had to—all the time I was coming to you."

"I danced for you. I've never danced like that before—it was the last time——"

"Sigrid—if you knew—why did you do it?—why have you hurt us both?"

"Have I hurt you?" She drew herself up a little, looking down at him with an exquisite compassion in her fading eyes. "Dear, it was to make you happy—to give you back all you had lost—I wanted you to see me—at the last—on the mountain-top—in my golden palace—don't you remember——? Not in decay and ugliness—but in beauty."

"It has always been in beauty!" he cried out in passionate protest.

She shook her head. Her eyes no longer saw him. They were fixed ahead on some brightening vision.

"Not always. You and I—we saw the same sunrise but we were afar off from each other. We stood on different mountain-peaks—there was a great valley between, which one of us had to cross before we could stand together. And one night—I couldn't bear to be so far off from you and I saw that your mountain-peak was higher than mine and nearer to the sun—and I made up my mind. I came down from my heights and went through the valley. It was so ugly—quagmire and darkness—and loathsome things—sometimes I felt I could never be clean again and sometimes that I should not have the strength to reach you—and in that time you could not see me but in the end we stood together—we're near each other now, Tristram——"

Her voice faded into an exhausted silence. He knew that her mind was clouded with a rising mist of old memories, old doubts and struggles. He could not wholly understand, and yet the recognition of an immeasurable, fearlessly born suffering came to him with her broken, fevered murmurs.

He bowed his face upon her hands.

"My mountain heights—oh, Sigrid, they have been low enough—if you knew how low——"

"I know everything—everything——"

He was silent. The certainty, serene and complete, broke in a shaft of light through his darkness. He lifted his face to hers. Her eyes were closed. Her fair head had fallen a little on one side in an attitude of great weariness. Slowly, in answer to his imperative appeal, her eyes opened. They were at first dim and expressionless as though she withdrew her sight from some inner vision.

"Everything—Sigrid?"

"Everything," she answered.

"Barclay——"

"He told me—but I knew more—I knew everything. Because I loved you I understood."

A fine, contemptuous smile touched her suffering lips. "I knew Anne, too. I knew how she had chosen——"

He got up, driven to his feet by an intolerable knowledge.

"Then you shielded me——"

"Do you grudge me that little comfort?" she whispered. Then as he stood staring down at her, she made a little helpless effort to touch his hand. "Bracelet—brother—you mustn't be too proud——"

"Oh, God——" he burst out. "It isn't that—don't you know I love you too—and you've suffered——"

"I've lived as I wished to live," she said with a sudden thrilling clearness, "and when I couldn't help you any more—when I saw that it was all useless I made an end—my end. I didn't mean to tell you—I meant to leave you a perfect memory—and to go silently. But you called me back. You made me—if you love me—you will be glad."

She struggled up on to her elbow, gasping for breath, and he saw the greyness creeping to her cheeks. He turned to fetch fresh stimulants, but she clung to him with an incredible strength.

"No—stay with me, Tristram—these must be perfect minutes—we've earned them—they're ours—there's nothing to regret—a happy death—it's what we live for—I'm happy—madly happy. Stay with me, Tristram—don't leave me in all this darkness——"

He dropped to his knees beside her. He slipped his arm beneath her shoulders, holding her in an embrace of desperate tenderness. She threw back her head, smiling.

"Kiss me, Tristram."

Their lips met. She fell back with a short sigh and lay still, her mouth a little open as though in the midst of a laughing triumph she had fallen asleep. But presently she stirred and drew closer to him.

"Happy, Tristram?"

"Yes," he answered.

And indeed all anguish, all fear had gone from them both. They had gone down together into a sea in which there was no thought, no memory, no desire. The coming night enclosed them, shielding them from the future.

"It's because I'm dying——" Then suddenly she laughed softly, contentedly. "Those steps—in the fast movement—no one—no one has ever dared them—no one has ever danced like that—it was a great triumph—the greatest——"

He bent and touched her forehead with his cheek, soothing her. She smiled a little as though in gratitude, and sighing, fell asleep.

He did not move. He knelt there listening to her breathing. It hypnotized him, drowning his consciousness in its sweet, unbroken rhythm. It conveyed no meaning to him. He had passed out of the regions of hope and dread into the serenity of resignation.

Far off, in some other world, he heard the whisper of rain, the patter of heavy drops in the dust-laden street. He heard voices—exultant, hysterical. A pregnant coolness crept into the suffocating quiet. He knew that the drought had broken—that the rains had come.

But it was another world. In this world there was nothing but himself and this one woman.

He bent lower to catch a murmur from her parted lips. One small hand still rested on his breast, clinging to him. Its hold was greater than death—stronger than the threat of life. It drew him down with her into her peace.

* * * * *

She awoke as the grey, rain-swept dawn crept sullenly through the open doorway. Only little by little had she fought back the engulfing oblivion. The shadow of the man standing beside her, watching her, had loomed huge and unreal. But now she saw his face and knew him.

"Tristram!" she whispered.

He seemed to draw himself up to a greater height. His features were haggard and painted with the livid pallor of the light.

"A messenger has gone to Gaya," he said. "They will send Smithy with a litter——"

"Tristram—I'm going to live?"

"Yes," he said, "the danger is over."

They looked away from one another, finding no word of comfort. The glamour of the night dropped from them. They had drunk of death, and of that intoxicated hour nothing remained but the bitter aftermath of life—an anti-climax, tragic and pitiful, half-grotesque, a little sordid.

And as two travellers who have reached what seemed their journey's end only to find the desert stretched before them, they faced the grey, unending road of their future.

CHAPTER X

ANNE CHOOSES

Outwardly the scene was commonplace enough. Women, for all their supposed emotional weakness, have for the greater part a knack of facing the graver crises with a deliberate and almost prosaic calm. And for one woman at least in that quiet room the moment could not have been more bitter, more fraught with ugliness and humiliation. Yet she sat very straight, very composed, tearing down the sanctity of her life without a quiver.

"You must think it very strange of me to come to you like this," she said, "but I had the feeling that, whatever else you would do, you would be frank with me. And I must know the truth. I must know where I stand. I must know what you are to my husband, Mrs. Barclay."

She looked straight at her companion as she spoke. She was not conscious of her own insolence. Her words had been forged in a fortnight's agony and had cost too much in their utterance to allow consciousness of any hurt but her own. Moreover, to her the pale, delicate-faced woman opposite her had no claim to her consideration. She was "one of those others" whom the remnant of man's prime favourite, the Victorian female, passes with gathered skirts. For in Anne's catalogue of humanity there were as yet only two varieties of her sex, the sexually virtuous and the sexually immoral. They were accordingly good women or bad women, no matter what other failings or qualities they might possess. Or, in a word, a woman's loyalty to her husband, prospective or actual, was all that mattered in Anne's eyes.

Mrs. Barclay, she knew, was a bad woman.

Sigrid regarded her thoughtfully from beneath the shadow of her hand.

"You are insulting me, Mrs. Tristram," she said, "but I do not think you mean it. I think you are unhappy, and that is excuse enough. Won't you explain exactly what you mean?"

"I'm sure you know," Anne answered unsparingly. "You were always—I don't know how to express it—but it seemed to me—to a great many people—that you tried to entangle my husband—before our marriage——. I could have borne that. I knew my husband so well. In many ways he is careless and unconventional. He doesn't recognize evil easily. But now—now it's different." She halted, fighting the tremor in her voice. It was the first trace of emotion that she had shown, and, in spite of her prim brutality, it was curiously pathetic. "Since the—the scandal in the temple—I've felt I couldn't bear it any longer. People have talked—they think—oh, I know—though they hide it from me—and I can't do anything. I can't because I don't know——"

"You don't know what?"

"Whether it's true."

"Wouldn't it be best—fairer—to ask your husband?"

There was a moment's silence. The splash of the rain on the trees of the compound sounded dismally in the room's stillness. Sigrid shifted her position. She leant forward a little as though to look closer into her visitor's face. The small white hand on her knee clenched itself. But Anne turned her face away from the intent, weary eyes. She bit her lips desperately.

"I can't——" she said. "I can't—that's just it——"

A tear rolled down her cheek. She brushed it away flurriedly, but the knowledge of her weakness broke down the wall of pride and anger which she had built up in her loneliness. "I can't because I sent him away. We'd quarrelled—no, it wasn't a quarrel—it was something worse than that—and—and he let me choose—and I told him to go. I was very wicked—very unjust. A wife's business is to forgive everything. I see that. But it's too late. He's gone, and now—now I've no one——"

It was not what she had meant to say. She had meant to be grave and dignified and judicial, and instead she was crying quietly. But now that the dam was broken her pent-up unhappiness flooded over her irresistibly. She had been intensely lonely. She had no great friend to turn to, and her instincts tended to a stern reserve where marital relations were concerned. She had hidden her growing fears and remorse under a cloak of indifference. Then had come the wild story of the temple, of Sigrid Barclay's night spent in Tristram's hut, of her supposed dangerous illness, of her apparently swift recovery. Then Gaya had begun to whisper, and those whisperings had been more than she could bear. She had meant only to seek the truth—instead she had poured out her overladen heart to the woman she most hated.

Sigrid got up slowly and went to the verandah. She stood for a minute with her raised hand resting on the lintel, gazing out into the rain-soaked gardens. The moist air was full of fragrance and reviving life. When she turned at last there was a splash of colour in her pale cheeks.

"Mrs. Tristram, send for your husband—go to him. He is the sort of man who doesn't need to forgive."

"I can't."

"You love him——"

"I couldn't go to him until I knew——"

"—that you had nothing to forgive?"

Anne's silence answered. Sigrid studied her with no shadow of change on her own palely composed features.

"We're two women, Mrs. Tristram," she said, "and that makes many impossible things possible—it makes it possible, for instance, though we dislike one another, for us to be honest—even about the man we both love."

Anne lifted her wet, piteously twisted face.

"Then it's true?"

"It's true that I love him." She played absently with one of the little silver ornaments on the table beside her, and then added: "It is true also that I offered myself to him, though I never meant to marry him—threw myself at his head. And that he refused me——"

"He didn't care——?"

Sigrid, glancing up, caught that look of mingled disgust and hope and fear, but it was the hope and fear alone that had significance.

"He had asked you to marry him. He told me that there could only be one woman in his life—and that woman his wife."

"That is true?"

"I give you my word of honour."

Anne sat very still. The tears were dry on her cheeks. She held herself rather as she had done at the beginning.

"And then—that night—a fortnight ago——"

"Ah, the temple?" She smiled faintly. "You won't understand that so well. You see, I am a mixture of a great artist and a bad woman. And artistically I have always realized how beautiful I should be against such a background. It was an artistic freak—though I daresay the woman in me had a spiteful hope that Major Tristram might chance that way and realize all he had lost. Anyhow, my heart failed me. Your husband acted the good Samaritan; and that is the whole story."

"If that is true I have done my husband a great wrong."

"I think you have."

Anne rose with a vague little gesture. It seemed to indicate barriers over which no reproof could pass. She was quite composed now. The strain and insolence had gone out of her manner, which was faintly patronizing.

"I have to thank you for your frankness. I—I shan't ever feel quite the same to you as I have done. Indeed—I hardly understand. You say you dislike me—and yet you've told me all this——"

"That's because most unscrupulous people are good-natured," Sigrid answered with careless amusement. She helped herself to a cigarette, aware that by so doing she was living up to Anne's conception of her. "You see, it doesn't cost me anything. This particular incident is closed as far as I am concerned, and you might as well enjoy the benefit of the truth. I am conscious that I tried to hurt you, and I'm sorry."

Anne nodded.

"I'm sorry, too," she said primly. She went towards the door and there hesitated nervously. "You're—you're leaving Gaya, are you not?"

"Yes, soon. My husband's business here is finished. It is very fortunate."

"Yes—very fortunate."

She lifted her eyes to Sigrid, realizing for an instant why Gaya had called her beautiful. An incredible impulse seized her, but she thrust it down in scorn and self-disgust. She made a little tentative movement as though to hold out her hand, and then turned and went out without a word. After all, it was the only thing to do. Now that her worst fears were over she saw that the scene had been preposterous, but she was a little thrilled by her own action as conventional people are when they have ventured out of their rut. She had met sin on her own ground and worsted her. In some dim way she believed that she had fought for Tristram and his happiness. Her anger against him had died—had been transmuted into pity. She saw that behind his bigness he was weak and easily led. Well, it was her task to lead him, to protect him. She was his wife.